'All right. Now. I want you to do a great deal of hard thinking in the next nine or ten months - I'm going to take you anyway; if I don't, somebody else will and you'll only get worse. Stop reading critics, and for Christ's sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why. Okay ? The rest comes later - hopefully. You'll get the letter in a few days. Tell Leigh to come in, would you?'

This may be bluffing, but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example, and that you're no better. The teenager can normally detach his own behaviour from his views on the behaviour of others; but I had no moral energy left.